În exclusivitate: Saint Jude (pseudonym)
A lot of racial unrest back in the 1960’s, but I didn’t really get involved in that kind of stuff. I had a lot of friends across all spectrums of society.
I was born and raised on the south side of Chicago. If you ever watched the movie The Blues Brothers, back in the 80’s, in the beginning of the movie, Dan Akroyd and John Belushi were driving the unmarked squad car through an area called Marquette Park. The guys portraying the Nazi party members were standing on a bridge when Akroyd and Belushi drove across. The Nazis jumped off the bridge into the Marquette Park lagoon. As a kid growing up, I used to walk from my house to Marquette Park, where I would hang out with my friends. We’d go out there for a variety of things, including golf, baseball, fishing and just plain bullshitting around as many others in our age group would do
At that point in my life, I just wanted to have fun. I was playing a lot of golf and ice hockey. I played both sports in high school and had some fair success with them.
When I grew up in the 60’s and early 70’s, the neighborhoods around us were all very safe. Everybody knew everybody who lived anywhere close by. I could go a half a mile in any direction and, if I caused some trouble I would be in trouble by the time I got home. It was amazing since there were not any cell phones to call and tell on you. Many families looked out for their own and others children.
If an adult or the police said you did something wrong, then you must have done something wrong. Compared to how it is today, there was no such statement such as, “Why are you bothering my kid?” Adults and the police were most always right. If you were a kid, you probably did something wrong.
Being a police officer – I never really thought about it as a career. I had dreams to be a professional golfer; and to be a millionaire by the time I was 35. I met my wife in college, I attended college on a scholarship. When I could not go any further playing golf and I needed a job I decided to follow some friends who were joining the police department. I applied, went through the hiring process and I got hired.
I began as most others and started out as a patrolman following completion of the academy. As a patrolman I would ride around in a squad car, responding to various calls for help or to take a police report regarding incidents which had occurred. I can’t remember the first call I handled. I do remember some calls for many reasons especially if they were unique . Most were calls for help; there were a lot of “domestics”, where the husband comes home and he’s knocking the shit out of his wife. You get there, you try to separate both of them. I would attribute most of the domestics involved alcohol or drugs.
I can remember some very funny ones. It’s just unbelievable how crazy some people are! I am sure one of my first calls was a domestic situation. Early in my career there were always things going on; traffic, vagrants and local troublemakers causing havoc.
The difference between then and now is the types of incidents and violence. There have always been people hurting and killing one another, however, now it seems to occur so often that it is hardly news. In the past neighborhoods took care of their own problems and parent/s handled their kids. Today the gangbangers run the streets and parents are very often uninvolved in their kids lives.
I spent just over 30 years in the police department. That’s sort of a loaded question – my most remarkable case ? – I worked in a variety of units. I spent a lot of time in narcotics. I spent time in investigations, working with detectives, in tactical units. I was involved in a narcotics case in which we seized 2-1/2 tons of cocaine. That’s a lot of cocaine. At that time, it was valued at over 700 million dollars. It came into the Fulton Street Market, which is in the downtown lake Street area, where a lot of your food goods come before they are distributed to grocery stores throughout Chicago. They were bringing produce in and, along with produce, they were bringing in plantains, which are somewhat like a South American banana. Instead of boxes of plantains, these were boxes of cocaine. The day after seizing the cocaine we received a call from the owner of the warehouse who didn’t want anymore trouble from the police. He told us that we missed some other boxes. We went back to the warehouse and recovered an additional 20 kilos of cocaine.
I can remember back in the early 1980’s, when a couple officers myself and friends knew were gunned down after a traffic stop. They were just leaving a funeral for another officer who was killed. They made a traffic stop and were shot to death by two offenders. The two offenders, two brothers, killed these two good officers in cold blood – shot them – came over and shot them again while they were down on the ground dying. During the early 80’s there were a lot of police officers killed – They were murdered in cold blood, by scum that was running the drugs and streets of Chicago.
There were a variety of bad cases I was involved in. I guess that the most troubling ones I saw were involving young innocent children. There have been people hurting kids far back, however today it seems to be much more common. In the 1950’s and 1960’s you had some high profile cases such as the Peterson, Schussler and Grimes sisters investigations in which young boys and girls were kidnapped, used for sex and eventually murdered.
Nowadays you hear more about these types of incidents. Today with the use of computers there are many predators out there looking to pick up and meet young girls or boys for sexual gratification. I have been involved in cases where people arrange to have sex with young children under the age of 14. Sex is one thing, but sex with an unwilling or an under-aged minor is, in my book, not even a consideration. These types of people who prey on young children have, whatever, there’s something wrong with them. It’s pretty sad!
I think these people deserve much more punishment than the courts currently give them for sexual crimes against children. Offenders in murder cases need to be dealt with much more severely. The death penalty was a deterrent and the current use of our laws is dysfunctional.
There have been many cases of multiple murders by one person… Prior to my time you had the murder of the eight student nurses on the south side of Chicago by Richard Speck. During the murders unknown to Speck one of the nurses hid under a bed, watching her classmates get murdered – after the killings Speck left – he ended up getting caught and eventually imprisoned. Richard Speck remained on Death row for decades and finished his time in prison as a girlfriend for the male inmates. Speck died in prison.
In the suburbs, you had John Wayne Gacy, also known as the Killer Clown, who killed 30-some teen aged boys. He was a builder and a Democratic Party Precinct Captain. He (Gacy) was a well respected member of the community. He even had a photograph taken showing himself with Rosalyn Carter who was the First Lady, wife of President Jimmy Carter. John Gacy liked boys; he had sex with boys; when he was done with them, he killed them. After killing them he disposed of their bodies under his crawl space. John Gacy was executed for these Murders in Illinois prison.
Another suburban case was the Browns chicken case. There were 7 employees who were found shot dead in the restaurant freezer. The case lingered for over 10 years until a girlfriend of one of the offenders came forward telling about her boyfriends involvement in the murders. The case was basically solved and the offenders were convicted using DNA evidence recovered from a piece of chicken thrown in the trash by one of the killers they waited to commit the Robbery/Murder. These 2 killers have been recently sentenced to life in prison.
